| What's Growing This Week: | |
Strawberries (All)
Cherries (All)
Peaches (All)
Snap Peas (all)
Salad Mix (All)
Green Garlic (All)
Snap Peas (S,L)
Red Russian Kale (M,L)
Summer Squash (M,L)
Cilantro (M,L)
Red Grapefruit (M,L)
Pink Lady Apples (L) --%
Items may be substituted without notice.
% -- Apples come from CCOF certified organic Cuyama Valley Orchards.
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Bulk Items
Ruby Red Grapefruit and Peaches (seconds) are available in bulk.
To sign up, log in to your account and go to the Web Store.
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Contact Us:
| terrafirmafarm.com
csa@terrafirmafarm.com
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| CSA Rates 2013 | Boxes are charged on Monday for the week's deliveries at:
$14 Small
$24 Medium
$32 Large
For a payment of $300, get a 3% bonus. Your account balance will be $309.
For a payment of$850, get a 5% bonus. Your account will be posted as $892.00
For a payment of $1,400, get a 7% bonus. Your payment will be posted as $1,498.
Vacations are charged weekly when notice is given as a fee, no charges occur during the vacation week.
$4 Small
$8 Medium
$11 Large
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Pledge of Authenticity
Terra Firma is a real farm. We grow 99% of the produce that goes into our boxes on our 220 acres of certified organic land in Winters. If we do buy produce from other farms, it's almost always from a neighboring farm and we give them full credit in the box list.
The owners of Terra Firma are involved in every aspect of making your boxes a reality: walking the fields, planting the crops, selecting and checking what goes in the boxes and finally delivering them to you. We eat the crops from our fields every day, just like you do. Thanks for supporting our efforts and enjoying the food we grow.
Paul, Pablito, & Hector
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Payments, Billing, and Changes
| Schedule vacations, change box sizes, make payments or sign up for autopay by logging in to your subscriber account at terrafirmafarm.com
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News From Terra Firma Farm
Community Supported Agriculture |
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Greetings!
At our farm, diversity is both an ecological and economic strategy. Growing numerous crops helps us keep at least some insect pests and diseases in check, but it also protects us from the financial damage that most farmers suffer if the weather destroys their crops or the price crashes.
We grow strawberries for many reasons. They offer us an exciting, delicious and generally abundant item to put in your spring CSA boxes. They provide us with cash flow and our employees with work at an otherwise cash-negative time of year. And every once in a while, we have a really great strawberry year, like 2012.
But strawberries are essentially a hedge for us against cool spring weather that delays the arrival of our real lifeblood: summer crops like tomatoes and melons. In general, if we have a good strawberry year, we have a bad tomato year and vice versa. Occasionally both crops do well, like in 2012. So far, thankfully, we've only had one year where both did poorly -- 2011.
The jury is still out on whether 2013 will be a good or bad tomato year, but it's not going to be one of our best strawberry years. The very warm to hot weather we've had since April is not what makes the berry plants happy. They are heat-stressed and cranky. After an early and relatively heavy start, the plants have mostly given up making flowers (and thus fruit). If we get a week or ten days of cool weather, they might rally with a final push of fruit, but those berries would be ripening in June -- sometimes the hottest month of the year here. And the trend in this year's weather is pretty clear towards heat.
All this by way of explaining that while strawberries are normally an abundant and regular component of Terra Firma's CSA boxes the entire month of May, from here on out they may be pretty scarce in your boxes. That said, this week marks the sixth week you've gotten berries (just five weeks for Medium boxes). Last year, the season was just one week longer.
Strawberries might not like the heat, but other crops on our farm do, and they will likely show up in your boxes earlier than they did last year. We have already been harvesting a few ripe tomatoes from the field -- just enough to eat ourselves. So it wouldn't be surprising if they turned up in your boxes long before June 20th, which was when we started harvesting last year. Which would be about as close as we ever get to having things go according to plan.
How about you? How would you rate this year's strawberry season compared to other years. Let us know,
Thanks,
Pablito
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In Your Boxes
Peas like hot weather even less than Strawberries do. We are harvesting the last Snap Peas of 2013 today (we may have one more week of Shelling Peas). We hope to begin harvesting Green Beans in a few weeks. The popularity of Kale has been growing by leaps and bounds, especially with the explosion of Kale Salad as a healthy convenience food. While spring is not ideal kale-growing weather here, we planted some this year in response to feedback from subscribers. The Red Russian variety is the only one that matures quickly enough here -- by the time other types are ready, the hot weather renders them inedible. Red Russian kale is more tender and less chewy than other kale. It cooks more quickly and has a milder flavor. Used in a salad, it doesn't need to be marinated for nearly as long as other kales. We are harvesting a few different varieties of peaches and nectarines right now. You may get a strange looking white peach in your bag today: flat with a depression in the top and bottom. So-called Donut Peaches are low acid and delicate in texture with a slightly nutty flavor. |
Size Up For Spring
Feeling like your box is a little light right now? Blowing through your berries, cherries, peas and greens? Many of our spring crops are high value items that take lots of time and energy to harvest, but not much time or energy to prepare and eat. We offer a few easy ways for you to get more good healthy food from the farm. 1) Size up your box. You can do this for a single week, if you like. Large boxes this week got double peas and berries as well as the additional items you see on the list. Small boxes next week will be getting cherries, but not berries -- Medium boxes will get both. Going up one box size costs $10. And you can switch back down any time. 2) Buy Bulk Items. We currently are offering half-flats of strawberries for delivery every week as well as 10 lb. boxes of Ruby Red Grapefruit. You can buy these items on a weekly basis, or set up a seasonal subscription. And if there is an item you use lots of and would like to get in bulk, just let us know via email. |
Recipe: Kale DipI know there are plenty of you who LOVE kale, but this recipe is for those of you who don't. Or for your kids. Combined with raw carrots and snap peas, this is a healthy snack. If you are a hard-core raw kale eater, skip the step where you cook it :) This recipe is from www.wholeliving.com.
Wash 1 bunch of kale and remove the tough stems. Chop roughly. Mince green garlic to make 1 T. Saute the garlic in 1 T. olive oil until tender, then add the kale and raise the heat. Cook for 3-4 minutes, add salt to taste. Transfer the kale to a food processor and add 1 C. cottage cheese (for a little tangier flavor, use 1/2 C. each cottage cheese and goat chevre.) plus 1 T. lemon juice and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Puree until smooth. Serve with sliced carrots and summer squash, and trimmed snap peas.
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